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Red Beans and Rice

It’s almost Mardi Gras so get your beads ready, or your boobs. I’m not really into that so I’ll just be at home stuffing my face with red beans and rice with sausage, maybe occasionally showing Chris my boobs just for kicks.

Red beans and rice is possibly the most New Orleans of New Orleans cooking. Traditionally made on Mondays with the leftover Sunday ham, nowadays it’s often served with sausage or a pork chop on the side.

My recipe is good for vegetarians, though, because it gets its flavoring from the Holy Trinity of celery, onion, and bell pepper plus smoked paprika rather than ham hocks. Fry up some sliced andouille or other sausage to serve on the side for meat-eaters.

Notes

26 Comments

Yep, we’ve walked the length of Bourbon Street. The last time was in January 2010, a couple of days before the Saints beat the Vikings to win the NFC championship. What people will do to get a string of beads! Originally, the street may have been named after the French dynasty, but now it’s more likely named after the distilled spirit of choice.

I liked this recipe. Very tasty. Ham hocks are not my favorite — tasty, but too gluey. Diced-up country ham would be nice. Andouille would be great with it. Kielbasa, too. Any smoky meat, really. If you’re serving it to a non-pork eater or someone avoiding salt or processed foods, then some smoked turkey would be good. A meaty wing or a leg. With a smoked turkey wing or leg, though, I’d cook it with the rice and beans and not on the side. Hmm, rice + beans + smoked meat + scrambled egg + warmed flour tortilla = Mardi Gras Breakfast Taco!

oh Hilah. Why did you use kidney beans? Red beans and rice is made with red beans… I’m jus’ sayin’!! RB & R is a staple in my house, I buy mine at HEB. Yours looks tasty, even with the wrong beans, but really they are quite different.

RACHAEL! I DON’T KNOW!!! 😛
I’ve just always made them with kidneys, and in fact never even thought to use the actual beans labeled “red beans” I see at the HEB! I like the creaminess of the kidney beans, though. Do you get that with the red beans?

Mashing some of the beans against the side of the pot makes just about any pot of beans creamy. Maybe to be safe and not tell any lies, I should say that it works with pinto, black, red and cannellini.

One my absolute favorite cookbooks is La Bouche Creole by Leon Soniat who, for years, wrote a food column for the Times-Picayune. Not only are the recipes fantastic, but he also prefaces each recipe with wonderful stories about how his mother and grandmother made each dish. The recipe for red beans and rice mentions how Monday was washing day when his mother had two big pots sitting over open fires in the backyard. One was for the clothes, the other for the red beans.

I’ve always felt a slight twinge of guilt because Soniat was adament that Creoles never put the andouille sausage in the beans, but serve it on the side, but I put it into the beans as they cook.

As luck would have it, I usually do my laundry on Fridays. I do mine in a washer and dryer. Which is just as well, because I don’t have a backyard and open fires are against apartment rules. Anyhow, I’m going to make your recipe this afternoon so I’m off to the store to buy the beans and andouille. I hope I can find actual red beans but they are getting harder to find. I should probably buy regular white rice, as well, but I’ve started buying 10 pound bags of basmati rice at an Indian store and use it for everything.

Great story, Randy! In a previous worklife, I worked on guest farmworker issues, many of them from the Caribbean. Heaven help a farmer who served black beans to a worker who came from a red bean island, or vice versa!

I’m just about the only gringo customer at my HEB, so I had to buy frijoles rojos pequeños. 🙂 Seriously, though, the only beans labeled “red beans” in English on the shelves were the ones where “red beans” is prefaced with “Cajun” and followed by “and rice”, include a seasoning packet and cost 3 times what the beans alone would. Oh, wait. I’m being unfair. Aged products always cost more. The beans are usually older than I am.

When my Cajun aunt made red beans and rice in California back in the Sixties, she used kidney beans. Years later, when she moved back to Beaumont, I visited her and she was using the smaller red beans. I made a joke about things supposedly being bigger in Texas (I still lived in California and had never seen real red beans before).

Randy, why don’t you skip the H-E-B middleperson and just shop at a Latin supermarket. Austin must be swimming in them. Here in the DC area, I always get my Asian foods at Super H Mart or Wegman’s, not at Giant Food or Safeway.

A few things:
I have been LOOKING for a good red-beans and rice recipe. I’ve only recently dipped my toe into the pool of dried beans instead of canned. This looks like deliciou-city. Get it? A city of deliciousness? A tiny city… I digress.

Hey Hilah, stuck my neck out and wrote Bobby Flay about you on facebook, about being a candidate for The Next Food Network Star. Might get you some more good name recognition anyway. You have quality recipes and great videos. Let The World Know!

No particular reason. Just two versions. The one in the book is an older recipe I came up with to try and replicate the ones at Popeye’s fried chicken chain. The one here I think is a little more authentic. Both are good!

Hilah, quick question and I don’t know where to post it: I’ve been using this recipe for my Louisiana-born husband and he loves it. But he insists that I saute the veggies in a bit of bacon grease before adding the beans and water. It comes out wonderfully tasty but since I don’t cook bacon all that often I was wondering how long one can keep bacon grease in the refrigerator; a few weeks, a few months, or what? Thanks!